For evidence, look at the deaths in the USA from gives and cars every year. Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.
It's remarkably how quickly people incorporate tragedy as normal when it doesn't fit their worldview. If you travel to 2000 and told people "in 2020 a pandemic will kill over 1 million Americans, and a good portion will brush it off as a 'nothing burger'" people would think you were being ridiculous and would dismiss it as unbelievable fiction.
It's one of our greatest strengths and weaknesses. It let's us keep living, but also allows us to normalize that which shouldn't be accepted.
If the opening of MFTF happened, within 2 weeks people would be posting graphs showing how per capita all cause deaths are actually going down over time.
A million people die a week, worldwide, from all causes.
Last I checked people are quite considered with global HIV death, especially since they can obviously be reduced dramatically.
0. https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/data-and-trends/stat...
We haven't entirely banned cars, and carbon emissions weren't totally banned after the wet-bulb event in Ministry for the Future.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_...
We will normalize climate related deaths the way we have normalized traffic related deaths.
If cars save me just 10 minutes per day, my life is improved as compared to the just under 7 minutes per day of life lost to the lifetime risk of dying in a car accident.
We normalize traffic deaths because there is a net benefit. Just like we normalize other negative outcomes from overall positive-utility activities.
What would you call a success? No death, total ban on driving?
What I would do about traffic deaths is irrelevant to my point.
Your original point was:
>Yet there is zero momentum toward doing anything about those from a policy standpoint.
This is clearly false. There are many effective regulations and travelling by car continues to get safer.
Yes people still die, yes we already somewhat normalise people dying from e.g. air pollution (not something that will happen, we already do it)
There are people who do think about these things every day. There are people who dedicate life to working on problems and progress is being made.
Saying that a major event would have no impact on the zeitgiest is questionable given history.
> There are people who do think about these things every day. There are people who dedicate life to working on problems and progress is being made.
Exactly. Despite that, here we are with 35K traffic deaths a year. Here's what would actually be necessary to "fix" the problem:
- 20 year project to build a tremendous amount of passenger rail - Manhattan project for self-driving cars - 10 year project to upgrade all city and highway signage to be self-driving car friendly - Close roads to human-driven cars when self-driving upgrades are ready
This probably sounds crazy to you. It sounds crazy to me too. And that's why I'm blackpilled on climate change: if we can't and won't do what it takes to fix traffic or gun fatalities on a national level, we definitely won't do it for a problem several orders of magnitude more difficult on a global level.
> Saying that a major event would have no impact on the zeitgiest is questionable given history.
There will be an impact. Just most likely not a positive one. It could highly negative (see post-9/11 wars), or completely insufficient (our current response to climate change).
Success could have USA/Canada/[insert other poorly faring nation] looking more like the low casualty numbers of other wealthy nations (eg. Norway) as well.
Honestly no death is a pretty good goal. Cynically one could say it's not achievable but trying is nonetheless worth while. In my jurisdiction in Canada I don't see the government even lifting a finger to implement the lowest hanging fruit of policies that would move the needle in the right direction, such is the status quo and politicization of the traffic safety issue. They're not even trying.
Efforts to implement various traffic safety concepts well used elsewhere in safer jurisdictions would be politically attacked here I'm quite sure.
As far fetched as any science fiction ever written
A heat related mass death event most likely would trigger a response. The real question is would it be organized and tidy response, or civil unrest?
When 4% hunt anymore and no one can grow a carrot? Suddenly logistics are interrupted worse than covid because, what, Phoenix burns down?
Oh, it’ll trigger a response.
Pandemic response was effective at avoiding healthcare system collapse and churning out a vaccine. It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
What else do you want? Too many seem to think the MCU should hop on saving them from themselves.
Say something useful yourself or get over it. You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
Perhaps you missed the analogy in my original between climate deaths and gun+traffic deaths.
> It’s as good a plan as we can get with 30% of 300 million intentionally indifferent, centrists too absorbed in low effort consumerism, and anyone espousing concern being called a tree hugging pussy.
You're so close to getting it. We will be talking about "sensible solutions" that maintain our current lifestyle until the planet turns into Venus.
> What else do you want?
I reluctanty have to admit I'm black pilled at this point. I see no reason to believe that our species is capable of the kind of collective action that's needed. There are no positive examples and so many negative examples.
> You were never going to make it out of this life alive anyway.
You don't have kids do you?
My whole effort here is throwing your low effort back at you; including your misuse of sighted for cited.
Frankly I think I get you a lot better than you get me. You are your own generalization/analogy/metaphor.
You’re doing nothing substantive while complaining about lack of substantive effort in the part of others.
Functional illiteracy in the raw, dog
> Functional illiteracy in the raw, dog
Not your dog, dog
So if a mass death event were to occur, and policy were to change course drastically, the changed climate would continue to pound our biosphere for many decades (if not centuries). Or hit tipping points and get worse & worse no matter what we do.
To put it blunt: at some point, prolonged mass suffering & death is practically guaranteed. Just with a decades-delayed fuse. That fuse is already lit, while we can't see (with any certainty, that is) how big a powder keg it goes into.
Might be different when a lot of people die in a whole region and it's very obvious. But who knows, I made detailed predictions at the onset of COVID and believed it would be handled like SARS and the likes and stopped in about 3 months. Well, I was completely wrong.
What is the benefit of vehicle transportation? Immense! They move goods around the country, provide people with rapid transportation, improve the movement of people of people around the country, etc, etc.
It's like looking at surgical deaths and saying "look at the death toll from surgery! such a tragedy!" all the while completely ignoring it's benefits.
I haven't read the book, but if the event the book describes kills hundreds of people or more, it seems like a plausible seed that news coverage can accrete around.
In the book, people galvanized around it kind of like 9/11 as it was clearly climate change, as opposed to other things that already existed and may or may not be due to climate change (more hurricanes, etc).
Be careful what you wish for. 9/11 galvanized Americans to start two disastrous wars. The effect of a mass fatality event like in MFTF could easily be a bunch of pointless, ineffective wars. There's precedent for that, but not for anything like a Ministry for the Future
I think it's going to take more than hundreds of deaths to go beyond a few news stories that get lots of clicks for a week or two and talking points for politicians to bring up when it's convenient and forget when it is not.
Almost all politicians are also owned by the car and oil industries, so that would explain the lack of action with the high number of RTCs.
First, one of the most popular arguments against action addressing climate change has been that climate change is simply fake. A mass-casualty event would make that argument less effective.
The gun control debate in the United States is linked with people's perceptions of personal agency. Often, a mass casualty event perpetrated with a gun is ended by a gun being used on the perpetrator (sometimes, it's the perpetrator killing themselves, and sometimes it's police killing them). Many people imagine it would be possible to end those events as a bystander with a gun. But I think that it would be much harder to get people to fantasize about being a hero that stops a mass casualty event resulting from extreme heat. Such an event starts and ends when Mother Nature says it does, and it seems like it should be pretty clear to people that the only way personal agency is relevant is in the act of preparing the environment.
I would have bought this 10 years ago. But following the recent rise of conspricism, especially far out things like Qanon and Pizza Gate, I've come to realize that it's possible for vast numbers of people to just decide to believe something is/isn't true because it suits them.
The Trump administration has banned the use of bump stocks, devices that let rifles fire like machine guns, after promising to do so earlier this year.
It's true that our system of government and industry is set up to preserve itself and resist sweeping change. It is further true some incredibly wealthy and influential individuals within the system are aligned with those goals, making change all the more difficult and unlikely (this applies to climate change as it does to gun laws, car culture, throw-away consumerism, etc). It is a mistake to equate trying and failing to change massive and powerful institutions with doing nothing.
I get it, from a cynical and pessimistic perspective, doing nothing vs trying hard but failing to do something all looks the same in the end (when society is roasting canned spam on it's own embers, as we might imagine). But fatalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and mostly appeals because it has the "benefit" of requiring no action of the individual. Just a lifetime of depression, apathy, and/or moral bankruptcy.
Even if the fatalist is wrong, it means people made things work out for them in the end and they didn't even have to lift a finger. What a deal! It certainly has its appeal to those parts of our brain that we share with lizards and other creatures that look to avoid personal risk and conserve energy at almost any cost.